I decided to buy myself a simple mobile phone as a birthday present. As some of you know, I used to have a very old Nokia that someone once gave me, but it finally gave up the ghost some months ago. I don't actually need a mobile phone as a phone but I do need something that I can use for authentication online if asked. They won't accept a landline number.

I bought the phone and asked for a pay-as-you-go sim card to go with it. This came with a glossy envelope from EE inscribed with the words "New 5GB data £10 plus 500 minutes and unlimited texts". I don't need the data allowance but 500 minutes calls and unlimited texts looked nice. However on the inside, it said, "Packs last 30 days and renew automatically."

Er?? Anything that lasts only 30 days isn't PAYG, it's a monthly subscription. And £10 per month is £120 per year, which is a lot for a pensioner like me to spend on calls she's not actually making, especially these days when food and fuel are priority expenses.

I tried making a call and got a recorded voice telling me it was emergency calls only as there was no money on the card. And there was I thinking (from what the leaflet appeared to say) that is was precharged with £10!

Obviously I needed help, so today I went down to the BT/EE office in town and asked for an explanation. The very nice lady told me that the card was indeed empty but that I could get it charged any time at Tesco. So I said, "I just go into any Tesco and ask for five or ten pounds top-up?" And you know what she answered?

"Five pounds only if you want pay-as-you-go. The minute you put ten pounds on that sim, you're treated as having signed up to the package as described."

What a dirty trick! The card was sold to me as PAYG but with no warnings that it would turn into a pumpkin at the end of the month if I was stupid enough to put £10 on it. Nothing anywhere on the leaflet to say, "This card only remains PAYG as long as you don't do as we suggest."

That's the modern world for you! It's a good thing my instincts warned me that there was something fishy about the wording in that pamphlet.

I'm with you, hazel. I never wanted a smartphone and just used Vonage which is pretty good, but 2nd party authentication requiring an SMS text number forced me to get a smartphone. It took me well over a year to decide how to best go about it and I'm still not quite complete. I bought a used Android phone and installed the De-Googled Android-based OpSys (in my case, Calyx), got a prepaid account from Verizon, and it's pretty OK so far. I may drop Vonage if it works out well and the price drops as it is supposed to after a few months. However I am still researching how to get a virtual phone number so I can use WiFi instead of cell towers strictly for SMS on my PC. I think that would be ideal but I don't yet grasp the cheapest way to get a usable virtual phone number, but I won't stop looking.

I'm hoping yours and others similar threads may gather in someone else who is currently doing the PC/Virtual Number thing. Thanks for the thread, and good luck.

"The large print giveith and the small print takeith away"

I can see now why the sim was empty when the leaflet implied that it should have had £10 on it. I had specifically asked for pay-as-you-go, so the shop couldn't put ten pounds on and turn it into a subscription. I had to be tricked into doing that myself.

Is a SIM only (ie bring your own phone) postpaid plan viable for you?

The one I'm on costs $AU10 (about £5 I think) per month and has unlimited Australian text/calls so I don't need a landline for phone.

Actually, If I wanted to use this mobile as my main phone, this EE package would be quite a good one. But I don't. I much prefer a landline. It means that anyone who wants to talk to me has to wait until I get home; they can't follow me around and insist on my dealing with them immediately. I really hate the idea of being always available. Almost everyone I see on the street is jabbering away into their phone. They never have any time to be alone and think.

Really I don't need a mobile phone at all. I just need an authentication device that can receive texts. But you're not allowed to use a landline for that so it has to be a mobile. And then I need to make the odd call or text once a month to keep it active. It's really tiresome but I live in dread of losing email access altogether for lack of such a device.

"Pay As You Go", certainly in the UK and Ireland, would be more rightly considered "Pre-pay on a rolling monthly basis with no minimum contract term" which doesn't quite trip off the tongue.

Haven't tried any of these.
https://www.raymond.cc/blog/top-10-s...without-phone/

The problem with these services is that generally they don't give you a unique number and many times the numbers used will go out of service / be rotated, so they aren't particularly suited for authentication / 2FA purposes.

The OP may find this of interest though: https://thesmsworks.co.uk/sending-text-landline

Yes, I know about this because my dentist uses it for patient reminders. The next working day before your appointment, you get a robotic message reminding you of the date and time. I find that quite useful.

The problem is that if you give an international landline number to an email provider like gmail (in the UK anyway), it just isn't accepted. You get a response saying "VOIP number not acceptable" or something like that. Actually UK landline phones mostly aren't VOIP, they're old-fashioned copper cable, but it makes no difference. You can't use them for this.

I had unfortunately thought that might be the case, I assume they do a check against the prefixes of mobile providers.

Check the terms of your Pay As You Go, I know that here in Ireland while the ability to send messages usually expires the ability to receive messages and calls doesn't, for a while at least (6 months from memory).

It works! I went to Tesco today and bought a £5 top-up. I tested it out by phoning myself, then added it to Google and got my details updated successfully. Now all I need is to remember to use it once a month to keep it active.

I'm willing to bet a cron job, perhaps employing STDOUT, can be directed to send some innocuous log once a month.

You misunderstand. Once you've registered a phone number with an email provider, that's that. They don't check up on it. But the phone has to be used to make a call or text once a month, or the sim card locks up and then it's useless. I just call my own landline.

Perhaps I did. I'm using wifi calling a lot on my new smartphone and also KdeConnect for usb tethering to my PCs. With that arrangement I think it might be possible to queue an automated phone call from my smartphone to my ersatz landline whenever I'm tethered one way or another, sort of like a printer queue which holds a job until resources become available.